Month December 2012

The National Rifle Association today held its first press conference since last week’s deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the takeaway was clear: We need more guns.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

He went on to call for an armed police officer to be stationed in “every single school” across America to prevent further mass shootings, as critics tried to point out that armed law enforcement officials might not be the panacea the NRA thinks it is.

But before they could finish their sentence, the counterargument made itself as news broke of a mass shooting event in Pennsylvania with multiple casualties, including state troopers.

According to local reports out of Blair County, at least four people were killed and five more were injured in a shooting spree near Altoona. The gunman is said to be among the dead, and at least two state troopers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

When Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday, December 14, inexplicably bent on ending as many lives as possible, he was carrying a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle and several high-capacity magazines. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the country has had to deal with the aftermath of a horrific shooting spree, nor is it the first time we’ve encountered an AR-15 in this context: only days earlier, it was the weapon of choice for a shooting at an Oregon mall that killed two people. Five months earlier, it was used by James Holmes in an attack that wounded fifty-eight people and killed twelve in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. And several years before that, a man and his teenage accomplice used a Bushmaster AR-15 to terrorize the Washington, DC, area with a series of random shootings.

Although it is not yet clear where the Bushmaster AR-15 used by Lanza (and registered to his mother) was purchased, the model is familiar to many Walmart shoppers. It’s on sale at about 1,700 Walmart stores nationwide, though the retail chain pulled the weapon from its website early this afternoon. While last week’s deadly rampage in Connecticut has finally and unmistakably highlighted the madness of making these weapons so readily available, it’s a concern many people with a Walmart in their community have been trying to address for much longer.